Your Friends & Neighbors 2025 Parents Guide

Your Friends & Neighbors is not rated because it’s a streaming-exclusive series on Apple TV+ and wasn’t submitted for MPAA classification, a common practice for original streaming content intended for mature audiences.

Review of Your Friends & Neighbors – A Critic’s Perspective

Jon Hamm is a man whose face, once onscreen, cannot go unnoticed and one gets instantly glued to the screen. He has got the square-jawed, ruggedly suave, hooded eye thing really well down and he inhabits that place where action thrillers and glossy dramas overlap. His portrayal of Andrew “Coop” Cooper in Your Friends & Neighbors simply takes advantage of his matinee idol persona but this is a part where the actor also has the potential to play the sleazy, amoral character.

The first scene of the series provides an immediate look into Coop’s life with a shot of Hamm awaking, confused and bleeding as the gunshot residue settles on his face. In the next chapter, the plot focuses on the disintegration of what can be considered a near ideal existence for the main character Coop. After loosing his position as the CEO of a hedge fund, he is faced with immense challenges of how to overcome the hardship, and more so to sustain the lavish lifestyle he and his family had got accustomed to. This leads him into the realm of small-time crime, and thus he becomes a thief targeting his rich neighbours in upstate New York.

What the show provides, at least in the pilot, is an entertaining mix of the macabre humor and light easy digestible drama. The first part can be best described as a standard show, a flashy opening scene, followed by a montage of the events that preceded the merciless bloodbath. Here we have an antagonist who turns into a protagonist despite being a drug supplying murderer, one never fully turns against Coop. Pender’s neighbors, whose globalization has put him out of business, are just smug enough to be a little deliciously satisfying when he starts stealing from them.

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The show embraces the lavish 1980s glamour and the characters go to fancy parties, drive luxury cars, and drink fine spirits. This conspicuous consumption is near slapstick, and at times invokes the idea of satire or a critique of the excesses of the one-percent, but it does not venture too far into being didactic. But, alas, it depends on cliches: the failed marriages, the adulteries, the midlife changes, and the petty offences. Similar to The White Lotus but focusing on relationships rather than the meth-dealing of Breaking Bad. In that sense, it’s more of Desperate Housewives with stealing than anything else.

Just as expected, Jon Hamm gives the show yet another excellent performance of comedic timing, and despite the strong supporting cast comprising of Amanda Peet and Olivia Munn who plays Coop’s estranged wife and new girlfriend respectively, the show is firmly and constantly anchored on Hamm. His style of addressing the audience is sarcastic while at the same time bringing a layer of meta to the show, though it could be too self-congratulatory at times where it feels like Hamm is making faces at the camera. They have crafted the character to where it seems like he knows that he’s likable to commit the crimes that he does.

The series posited itself as a high-stakes heist drama, but by mid-season one, the show segues into even darker and much more perilous waters as Coop’s life of crime begins to take its toll. The mug and bullets, the developing relationship with the police force and his family’s business, both personal and professional, contribute to upping the dramatic ante, meaning becoming more like a soap opera in later episodes. On the one hand, it is beneficial as it makes the show rather dynamic and interesting to watch but, on the other hand, it often results in the show sacrificing character development and analysis of its themes.

It must be said that Apple TV+ was confident in the show, ordering a second season before the first one was out. If it wasn’t for Hamms headline star power the show could have been just another mediocre success story which could punch the heavy blow. Still, we have seen this kind of anti-hero with questionable moral compass in TV dramas before and in many of these instances, it has been done better. Yet, in the Your Friends & Neighbors, the actor is extremely intriguing – perhaps the most interesting he has been since Don Draper in Mad Men.

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Finally, Your Friends & Neighbors can be viewed as a guilty pleasure, involving the protagonist who is not only intriguing but also compelling despite of his growing involvement in criminal activities and lies. It’s glossy, it’s fun, and with Hamm at its helm, it’s pretty unmissable, even if there’s very little depth to it.

Your Friends & Neighbors 2025 Parents Guide

Violence & Gore: The pilot starts off with a brutal scene of a murder: a man, Coop, is shown waking up in a pool of blood alongside a dead body. The actual murder is never depicted at the start of the scene; however, blood and the clear view of the body are presented, which can be considered as rather disturbing.

Apparently, subsequent episodes depict even more violent scenes as Coop indulges in criminal activities. There will be scenes of physical confrontation, threats and possibly use of a gun as the police will be involved.

There are elevated levels of verbal aggression, such as husband and ex-wife fights, conflicts with neighbors, and dramatic scenes that imply aggression.

Language: occasional strong language and brief nudity; sexual references and possible use of religious profanity.Profanity and crude humor toward oneself and others is often seen, especially, in Coop’s first-person narrative.

Disputes entail the use of foul language, the use of harsh words and scores and other derogatory describe.

Sex & Nudity: Affairs and sexual content are shown prominently in the series, reminiscent of themes in TV series like Desperate Housewives and Big Little Lies.

Some people might have sex conversations, there may be scenes that are sexual and there may be partial nudity such as characters lying in bed together, or possibly having intercourse.

Sex, including infidelity and affair, explicit relations, and multiple love interests are depicted without any emphasis on right and wrong, sometimes portrayed humorously or callously.

There is infidelity in the show for at least one character and let us not forget the sensual Vibe that comes with an affair.

Substance Use: Drug use is depicted explicitly and repeatedly. Coop is shown crushing and snorting ADHD medication (belonging to his children), reflecting a casual and reckless attitude toward prescription drug abuse.

As the season progresses, he reportedly escalates to using “nose candy”, a euphemism for cocaine. These scenes may show preparation, inhalation, and the behavioral consequences of drug use.

Alcohol consumption is frequent. Characters drink whisky (Macallan 25), wine, and cocktails in most social scenes, including daytime drinking and drinking while parenting or working.

Substance use is often normalized in the context of upper-class culture and is not always presented as overtly harmful, though consequences do unfold later.